Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 22, 2003 - Dakota Worldwide, Inc in collaboration with Synergos Technologies announces the on-going quarterly release of ZCTA (Zip Code Tabulation Areas) boundaries. We have taken the ZCTA boundaries as created by the US Census bureau and refined the boundaries to more properly align with our in-house ZIP plus 4 datasets yielding the most accurate ZCTA boundary set. Furthermore, our boundary set is updated quarterly to reflect changes in the USPS ZIP-code assignments.

The reason we chose to begin with ZCTA's is we agreed with the Bureau's design criteria for determining a ZCTA. A prominent part of that criteria is that a ZCTA would not split a Census Block. Since all population data is collected at the block level, it then became obvious to us by continuing to use this criteria data analysis would be significantly easier to perform, because we would no longer have to make guesses as to how to allocate population when a block is split to conform to a postal standard, as a oppose to a demographic one.

We also spent hundreds of man-hours making sure that all ZCTA's boundaries were properly aligned to one another. By doing this we eliminated the' holes' created by most GIS packages, when the analyst attempts to merge or join several adjoining areas into a singular region. Finally, we added thousands of points to reflect locations Postal Box locations. The file is available in MapInfo format and may purchased on a annual or quarterly basis.

Dakota Worldwide Corporation is a Minneapolis-based software and service company helping some of the nation's largest and best retailers grow with programs to maximize rates of return on both capital and operational expenditures. Large chains and small independents in all 50 states are key customers of Dakota Worldwide. Dakota Worldwide Corporation is the nation's foremost authority in market analysis and is the number one provider of market analysis software for the supermarket industry. Synergos Technologies is an Austin Texas based desktop mapping consultancy and developer of software data and demographic tools. STI's product line includes several innovative desktop-mapping tools created by the company's developers.

Further information is available by contacting Dakota World Wide on the company's web site at http://www.dakotaww.com or by calling Elliott W. Olson at 1-800-475-4505, or by email at e.olson@dakotaww.com